there's no going back. this is the new normal.

Events

So, I was thinking this morning... life is weird. Stupid small things seem so important when they're not, we fuck up on the most critical stuff all the time, we hurt each other, and love each other, and it's all so fragile and gone in the blink of an eye.

Hot One Inch Action is an art show put on every year by Hot Art Wet City, an organization that promotes local artists in Vancouver and organizes various shows around town. Hot One Inch Action now happens in Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and for the first time this year also NYC. This is the third year in a row I've attended the show, it's really fun as you (as an attendee) can take part by buying $5 bags of buttons and then trading to get the buttons you like best!

That's all great on its own, but... this year I had a button in the show! Not only is it my first time with a design in the show, but it's the first time I've ever entered a submission in any kind of art show! So many firsts!

Knitters from Vancouver and surrounding areas have been eagerly chomping at the bit for weeks, nay months, waiting for this past weekend to arrive. Why? Knit City!!!

Knit City was a weekend-long event put on by Knit Social, a knitting event company run by Amanda Milne and Fiona McLean. It was the first one, but judging by how popular it was, I doubt it will be the last. The level of excitement about this event was hard to contain - Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook were full of knitting posts and high praise for the event. It was indeed wonderful!

Summer has been flying by - time for an update! Life with Bruno has been fantastic. Only minor adjustments to living together, we'll just say I'm nowhere near sick of him! In fact, if you know of any cool companies or organizations who'd like an extremely skilled Drupal themer, please point them here: http://brunodbo.be/work. Bruno is looking for a prospective employer to offer him a job, so he can apply to stay on as a skilled worker. We won't be common law until next April, so it's the only way he can stay!

It hasn't been the hottest June and July Vancouver's seen, but we've made the most of it with a week off to take a train trip to Seattle and Portland. Lots of delicious food - I ate a lot of vegan ice cream and treats, and Bruno was in vegetarian heaven. And visiting with our PNW friends is always a lovely bonus!

The weeks (months) leading up to the Christmas holidays continued to be really busy. We'd been really cramming at work, and I was also doing a lot of Drupal work (we had a big Documentation meeting/sprint weekend the weekend before holidays that people flew in for, and it's also been a big push getting the Drupal 7 docs done for its release which is coming up this week). I was definitely running on fumes. Thankfully we'd made the wise decision early on to shut down entirely at work for two weeks over the holidays, so we could all take a proper, well-deserved break. I went back to Saskatoon for a full week and a half, to have Christmas with my parents, and basically just do what Frankie says (ie. relax).

So first, a little catch up from before my last posts... back in June, I went to Saskatoon for a weekend to go to the wedding of one of my next door neighbours from where I grew up. The Sulatyski family lived next door to me my entire Saskatoon-life (plus a couple years after I moved to Vancouver), and are like my second family... sometimes I feel like I grew up more Ukrainian than any other culture!

And just like that it's over. It's a small miracle that I actually made it to San Francisco for DrupalCon SF. As I mentioned before, I caught the flu just over a week and a half before I was supposed to leave for the conference, and was SOOOOO sick. I got a fever, then the worst cough I think I've had since I was a kid. My mom saved my ass and came out and stayed with me for a week, I hardly left my bed the entire time. She went back to Saskatoon about three days before I was supposed to leave for SF, but I was still pretty sick, and was about 5 days into a week of having lost my voice. Making the con did NOT look promising.

October was a great if not overbooked month. Between BarCamp Vancouver, the Drupal 7 Conrib Sprint, and the big PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle last weekend, I had only one weekend off the entire month (on which there was also Drupal Camp Portland, but I decided that would be pushing it). I made up for the past month in a big way this weekend, going out to socialize only once (last night for Halloween), sleeping in till 10am both mornings, doing laundry, cleaning my bathroom, cooking, reading, chatting with my folks on the phone, and generally being a homebody.

BarCamp was this weekend - I was so-so on it last year, it was still fun, but not many sessions really did it for me, so I came in with relatively low expectations, thinking that maybe I'd just been to too many Camps and Cons now for them to still inspire and interest me... I am happy to report that I actually had a superb time, and am not too old and jaded to enjoy these events. :-) The organizers did a great job (thanks a bunch, you are all awesome) and everything went off flawlessly. Enjoyed the sessions I went to, and there were many more I wish I could have made it to (most sessions are listed here, some have notes/slides).